Another piece of the Google social net

It’s not a huge deal, really — as Greg Sterling notes over at Screenwerk — but the news that Google has added social features to Google Maps is just another piece of the puzzle that is (or at least could be) the Web company’s emerging social net. The features aren’t…

It’s not a huge deal, really — as Greg Sterling notes over at Screenwerk — but the news that Google has added social features to Google Maps is just another piece of the puzzle that is (or at least could be) the Web company’s emerging social net. The features aren’t rocket science, of course: user profiles that link to maps a person has created, reviews they’ve written of local businesses, etc. But it ties some things together in ways they weren’t before.

As many people have noted — including me in this post — Google has been working on what appears to be a unified social-networking approach that would bring together many of its existing services such as GTalk, Orkut, Maps, Picasa, etc. and let people create what amount to “activity streams” that others could subscribe to, hints of which first appeared in a post at Google Blogoscoped.

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I'm a Toronto-based writer, and this is where I write about online media, technology and other interesting things I come across on the Web. I am a former senior writer at Gigaom, a former blogger, columnist, reporter and social-media editor at the Globe and Mail and a former writer with the Financial Times of Canada.